Posted on 08/10/2014 12:46:23 AM PDT by Smokin' Joe
I have spent a little time compiling links to threads about the Ebola outbreak in the interest of having all the links in one thread for future reference.
Please add links to new threads and articles of interest as the situation develops.
Thank You all for you participation.
Thanks for the info. I wasn’t aware the Liberian transportation system was so bad.
The rainy season is about to start, which means mosquitoes and malaria. There are already too many dead to properly dispose of. At some point the water supply will become contaminated. Dysentery and cholera will follow.
In other words, Liberia faces the perfect storm. There may not be much of Liberia left by next spring. Liberia has about 4 million people.
I assume Sierra Leone is in the same position, just not quite as far along. Guinea might be also.
The combined population of these three nations is a bit over 20 million. Given current international policies it is hard to imagine how it will be contained to just those three countries.
Particular blame of individuals for this disaster begins with Margaret Chan, director of the World Health Organization. Their failure to act on proffered vaccines indicates enormous rot within the WHO overall. It sounds like the world would be much better off sending everyone in WHO to Ebola to disinfect buildings with toothbrushes than letting them continue to endanger the world doing anything else, particularly elsewhere.
Ping to this....
Texas Patient Being Evaluated for Ebola (Dallas)....
http://twitchy.com/2014/09/29/texas-patient-being-evaluated-for-possible-ebola-infection/
Apparently the patient was sick enough to seek treatment. D@mn! Oh, and the patient had recently returned state-side from Africa.
That is too flipping close to where I live.
It is across the street from where my children’s doctor has an office!
Busy day at the PANDEMIC FLU INFORMATION FORUM Ebola thread, See —
“CDC issues Ebola guidelines for U.S. funeral homes”
http://www.kfvs12.com/story/26657838/cdc-issues-ebola-guidelines-for-us-funeral-homes
Sep 29, 2014 Jocelyn Connell
CBS46 News has confirmed the Centers for Disease Control has issued guidelines to U.S. funeral homes on how to handle the remains of Ebola patients. If the outbreak of the potentially deadly virus is in West Africa, why are funeral homes in America being given guidelines?
More from the PANDEMIC FLU INFORMATION FORUM —
09/29/2014
By Mary Jane Dittmar
http://www.fireengineering.com/articles/2014/09/cdc-posts-ebola-guidelines-for-ems.html
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has posted Interim Guidance for Emergency Medical Services (EMS) Systems and 9-1-1 Public Safety Answering Points (PSAPs) for Management of Patients with Known or Suspected Ebola Virus Disease in the United States.
LAURIE GARRETT has another good article on Ebola. Well, good in terms of truth, a horror in describing reality on the ground in West Africa.
Obama called the world to action against Ebola, but most countries are only paying lip service to the coming catastrophe.
BY LAURIE GARRETT
SEPTEMBER 29, 2014
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2014/09/29/hollow_words_exponential_horror_ebola_crisis_reponse
An ‘Awww Crud’ article from PANDEMIC FLU INFORMATION FORUM, which tells us that bleeding is not as common a symptom as the CDC/WHO make out —
By Lindsey Dow
September 29, 2014.
http://guardianlv.com/2014/09/ebola-bleeding-less-common-but-more-deadly/
Although bleeding is generally considered one of the most tell-tale signs of Ebola, recent data collected on patients in West Africa suggest that bleeding is less common but more deadly, at least with the strain in West Africa. The report, published by the New England Journal of Medicine, contains data on 1,415 Ebola patients from Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea and Nigeria, with an onset of symptoms as recent as August 17.
Now we know why Ebola CFR data from Liberia sucks so badly. They are burning all the bodies and are not testing them for Ebola as it is too risky to the remaining lab workers.
Via the PANDEMIC FLU INFORMATION FORUM -
GEOFFREY YORK
MONROVIA — The Globe and Mail
Published Monday, Sep. 29 2014, 9:46 PM EDT
Last updated Monday, Sep. 29 2014, 9:48 PM EDT
When the body collectors arrived at the home of Theresa Jacob, at the top of a rocky hillside in Liberia’s capital, her family fought to keep her body. She didn’t die of Ebola, they insisted, showing a stack of hospital documents.
It was a futile battle. After a long argument, a team of Red Cross specialists entered the house in full Hazmat suits, goggles, masks, hoods, boots and two layers of gloves. They disinfected the body of the 24-year-old woman with a heavy chlorine spray, put her into a body bag, carried her down the hillside to their truck and drove her away to be cremated.
Because of the risk of Ebola, every body in Monrovia now is collected and burned, regardless of the cause of death. It’s a symptom of a nearly collapsed state in a massive emergency, when extraordinary measures are needed. With at least 1,830 deaths by official count – and two or three times that number by unofficial estimate – Liberia is the most devastated country in the Ebola zone.
Ms. Jacob’s neighbours were shocked when they saw how her body was collected. “Oh, they’re putting her in a plastic bag,” said one woman, wailing with grief.
Everyone in the neighbourhood knew that Ms. Jacob died of the liver illness that had left her bedridden for the past four years. But now she will never have a grave. Her family will have nowhere to visit on Decoration Day, the annual Liberian holiday when everyone goes to the cemetery to clean and decorate the graves of their ancestors, often painting Biblical inscriptions and images on the tombs to thank the ancestors for their sacrifices.
Ebola tests are not even conducted on dead bodies any more, because it’s believed that the information is not worth the extreme infection risk of taking samples from the bodies, and the delay of waiting two days for the results.
>snip<
Score one for Thud.
He called it as far as the coming West African societal collapse sequence is concerned.
By Marc Bastian (AFP) 46 mins ago
http://www.digitaljournal.com/news/world/ebola-hit-liberia-staring-into-the-abyss-experts-warn/article/406075?
With its collapsed health service, sick and poorly equipped security forces and broken economy, Ebola-hit Liberia finds itself on the brink of complete societal breakdown, experts warn.
The already impoverished west African state was on the slow road to recovery after 14 years of ruinous civil war ended in 2003, following the deaths of 250,000 people.
But Information Minister Lewis Brown recently warned that the epidemic, which has left more than 1,800 dead so far this year, risks plunging Liberians back into conflict.
Many observers of the country’s latest devastating crisis, while stopping short of talk of war, worry about the heightened risk of unrest in a country stalked by death.
“We have a lot to worry about. If we have thousands or tens of thousands more deaths, that’s going to have a very destabilising effect,” said Sean Casey, director of anti-Ebola operations in Liberia for the International Medical Corps (IMC).
A humanitarian worker, speaking on condition of anonymity, reflects growing concern among politicians, analysts and health care workers over the possibility of a “social explosion”.
“There is the fear, frustration, anger at the impotence of the government, and the associated economic destabilisation,” he said.
Monrovia, a sprawling, chaotic capital city of more than one million inhabitants, remains under control but gives the impression of a powder keg that could ignite at the slightest provocation.
Early Saturday, police came to investigate a body left lying in the street, the apparent victim of a murder.
A small crowd gathered, watching as a truck with the word “Ebola” emblazoned on the side pulled up, called just as a precaution.
Suddenly the crowd began yelling, pelting police officers with stones, and a brief scuffle ensued, in which at least six men were arrested.
The force assured locals that they would investigate claims that police had killed the man because he was out during the nighttime curfew.
The atmosphere is just as tense outside Ebola treatment centres, where large crowds of relatives gather, deprived of news of their loved ones.
“We beg the international community to find a solution before everything goes off here,” cries Kevin Kassah, a young man in the middle of one such angry crowd.
- Hunger setting in -
Woefully short of manpower, security forces do not intervene in the protests of these seething gatherings.
Several police stations in Monrovia have closed after officers died of Ebola fever, and a military camp on the outskirts of Monrovia has reported around 30 sick soldiers, according to a diplomat.
The health system — embryonic at best before the crisis, with some 50 doctors and 1,000 nurses for 4.3 million people — has been hit hard, losing 89 health workers out of 184 infected, according to the World Organization Health Organization (WHO).
“A lot of hospitals are closed right now because the staff died,” says Casey, of the IMC.
In a stark illustration of the crisis, the country’s most senior medical officer is currently in quarantine after her deputy died of Ebola fever.
The WHO and various charities have stepped in to fill the gap left by the weakened authorities, basing their activities in a new but desperately short-staffed “Ebola Operation Centre” run jointly with the government.
The World Bank gave Liberia 41 million euros ($52 million) last week towards its Ebola response, but the government, lacking the resources or the confidence to manage the money, immediately handed it over to the United Nations for the maintenance and construction of treatment facilities.
In another symbol of the breakdown of governance and heightened tension in the capital, a male junior finance minister was sacked last week for assaulting a policewoman.
No sector of society has been left untouched by the crisis.
Schools have been closed for months with no reopening date in sight, and unemployment is soaring as both the formal and black-market economies collapse.
Meanwhile hunger is becoming a problem in the streets of Monrovia.
“Before, I was making 1,500 (Liberian) dollars (14 euros, $17.75) a day. Now to get 500 is not easy. Everybody remains home,” says Kerkula Davy, a father of three who sells belts to motorists at a crossroads.
“It’s not enough for food. I need at least 800 a day.”
Sorry, no such animal.
“The Novartis Holly Springs site stands apart because of new technology that can produce vaccines in animal cells through a process called cell culture. Flu vaccines have traditionally been produced by growing the virus in chicken eggs, which can take up to six months. Instead, Novartis’s Holly Springs plant makes flu vaccine from animal cells, specifically, a cell line from a dog’s kidney. This cell culture process takes about 30 days.
Novartis broke ground in Holly Springs in 2009. Two years later, the plant was ready for production. In June, the Food and Drug Administration licensed the Novartis facility to produce seasonal flu vaccine made from cell culture. This facility is the first, and so far only, plant in the United States approved by the FDA to manufacture influenza vaccine cultured in animal cells. It will produce about 50 million doses of seasonal flu vaccine annually, but it has the capacity to expand in emergencies. The Novartis site was designed to have the capacity to produce 200 million doses of flu vaccine within six months of the declaration of a flu pandemic.“
“
ZMapp Ebola Drug Production Set for Texas, Possibly North Carolina
Frank Vinluan9/30/14Follow @frankvinluan
http://www.xconomy.com/raleigh-durham/2014/09/30/zmapp-ebola-drug-production-set-for-texas-possibly-north-carolina/
A federal initiative to ensure that the United States can respond to biological threats at home will be put to the test in response to the Ebola outbreak in West Africa.
A Texas site is preparing to manufacture the experimental Ebola drug ZMapp, says Robin Robinson, director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), a division within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Robinson adds that Novartis’s (NYSE: NVS) vaccine facility in North Carolina is a possible second site to make the drug. Those sites were developed previously in partnership with a U.S. government effort to establish response centers capable of manufacturing drugs and vaccines in an emergency.
ZMapp, developed by San Diego-based biotech Mapp Biopharmaceutical, is a biological drug. The antibodies that spark the immune system are produced in tobacco plants, then extracted from the plant to make the drug. A Kentucky subsidiary of Reynolds American grew the tobacco plants that made the monoclonal antibodies in ZMapp. Robinson says BARDA is now working with a response center at Texas A&M University to bring the tobacco drug-making technology from Kentucky to Texas. The university and its industry partners will use that technology to make ZMapp.
“They would respond by making that product, then helping us through clinical trials, then taking it to where it’s needed,” Robinson says.
Robinson, who is also deputy assistant secretary for preparedness and response at HHS, was in North Carolina last week for a Novartis event marking the first shipments of seasonal flu vaccine from the company’s Holly Springs, NC, vaccine plant. He says new vaccine production technology that Novartis has implemented to make flu vaccines more quickly could also, if needed, be used to make biological drugs such as ZMapp. The government earlier this month committed up to $42.3 million to help Mapp Bio accelerate development and testing of its Ebola drug.
The idea of creating drug and vaccine manufacturing centers followed the global H1N1 influenza pandemic in 2009. The HHS awarded three contracts in 2012 to establish three centers, called Centers for Innovation and Advanced Development and Manufacturing. These centers, which would address threats from naturally occurring diseases as well as acts of bioterrorism, represent alliances between government, industry, and academia.
Texas A&M recently opened a pandemic influenza vaccine manufacturing facility in Bryan, TX—part of the response center it leads under a five-year $176 million contract. GlaxoSmithKline (NYSE: GSK) is the university’s largest industry partner. Emergent Manufacturing Operations Baltimore, which has Maryland sites in both Baltimore and Gaithersburg, leads another center under a $163 million contract over eight years; Emergent Manufacturing is working with Michigan State University, Kettering University in Flint, MI, and the University of Maryland, Baltimore.
And Novartis leads a response center at its vaccine manufacturing plant in Holly Springs, which was developed under a $60 million contract. This center operates in partnership with NC State University and Duke University. Novartis’s flu vaccine relationship with BARDA predates the formation of the three response centers. In 2006, BARDA awarded Novartis a contract valued at up to $220.5 million to develop a cell-based influenza vaccine.
In conceiving the response centers, the government emphasized both capacity and speed. Each center must be able to produce at least 50 million doses of pandemic flu vaccine within four months. The government also requires that the centers be able to deliver the first doses for distribution within 12 weeks. The reason for three centers is not for geographic diversity. While there is some overlap among the centers, each center has capabilities that set it apart from the others, Robinson explains.
The Novartis Holly Springs site stands apart because of new technology that can produce vaccines in animal cells through a process called cell culture. Flu vaccines have traditionally been produced by growing the virus in chicken eggs, which can take up to six months. Instead, Novartis’s Holly Springs plant makes flu vaccine from animal cells, specifically, a cell line from a dog’s kidney. This cell culture process takes about 30 days.
Novartis broke ground in Holly Springs in 2009. Two years later, the plant was ready for production. In June, the Food and Drug Administration licensed the Novartis facility to produce seasonal flu vaccine made from cell culture. This facility is the first, and so far only, plant in the United States approved by the FDA to manufacture influenza vaccine cultured in animal cells. It will produce about 50 million doses of seasonal flu vaccine annually, but it has the capacity to expand in emergencies. The Novartis site was designed to have the capacity to produce 200 million doses of flu vaccine within six months of the declaration of a flu pandemic.
The ability to quickly manufacture large quantities of medicine would allow the response center to meet government orders for vaccines or drugs during an outbreak of infectious disease, such as flu, or even Ebola.
“That’s what the cell culture [technology] is predominantly about,” says Brent MacGregor, Novartis’s president of U.S. vaccines. “We’re able to scale up more quickly in the event of a pandemic than would otherwise be the case with egg production.”
The Holly Springs plant already has experience responding to a global pandemic threat. When H7N9 influenza emerged in China last year, Novartis scientists in North Carolina received information about the flu strain from health officials in China. Novartis then used its cell culture technology to develop a vaccine. That H7N9 work emerged from research funded by a separate federal grant awarded to Novartis, which supported a collaboration with the J. Craig Venter Institute in San Diego to use synthetic biology to make new influenza vaccines. The H7N9 vaccine produced by Novartis remains stockpiled, for use if needed, in Holly Springs.
In the event of an emerging infectious disease within the United States, the government would take similar steps to respond to the threat. One or more of the response centers could be tasked with making a drug or vaccine for the disease, Robinson says. Those drugs can come from any number of drug companies, including small biotechs such as Mapp Bio. While the Novartis plant in Holly Springs was built for vaccine production, Robinson says its cell culture manufacturing technology makes it capable of manufacturing biological drugs, like ZMapp.
“It’s a biological, a monoclonal antibody,” Robinson says. “So they could make it here.”
Frank Vinluan is a contributing editor at Xconomy, based in Research Triangle Park. You can reach him at fvinluan@xconomy.com
_________________
bkmk
I am calling this an intelligence indicator of a positive result.
The CDC is too bloody busy with West Africa and EDV68 to spare anyone for a non-positive result.
By Stephen Young Tue., Sep. 30 2014 at 11:32 AM
http://blogs.dallasobserver.com/unfairpark/2014/09/cdc_headed_to_dallas_in_advance_of_ebola_results.php
Dallas County Health and Human Services gave an update Tuesday morning on the status of a patient potentially infected with Ebola currently being cared for in isolation at Dallas’ Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital and the county’s’ preparation in the event an Ebola case is confirmed. No details have been given about the patient, other than that he or she is being kept in “strict isolation” and was admitted based on symptoms and “travel history.”
“This is not Africa,” DCHHS Director Zach Thompson said. “We have a great public health infrastructure to deal with this type of disease.”
Christopher Perkins, the medical director for county health services, made it clear the risk for outbreak is low because Ebola cannot be spread through the air. Ebola can only be spread through contact with blood or bodily fluids.
Two men who visited West Africa, the epicenter of this year’s Ebola outbreak, warned the commissioners about the effects of the disease and urged Dallas County to send whatever help it could in order to stem Ebola where it’s most prevalent.
After leaving the commissioner’s court meeting to participate in conference call with the Centers for Disease Control, Texas Health Presbyterian and state health officials, Thompson and Perkins returned with an update.
The potential Ebola patient’s test results are not in yet, but are expected later Tuesday afternoon or Tuesday evening. CDC personnel are on their way to Dallas in case either of the two samples from the patient being screened are positive for Ebola. If the test was to come back positive, the CDC would lead any actions necessary, with the county providing support, Thompson said.
Based on your reading in this thread, count the number of misstatements of the Ebola threat in the following.
This Dallas County Health and Human Services director Zachary Thompson appears to be a real piece of work.
I heard him on the local Soul/R&B radio station this AM during the morning commute spouting the “..you have to engage in blood rituals or be barfed upon to get Ebola” bildge water.
I will try and keep you all up to date on the latest local CDC messaging.
You all will be hearing it soon.
By Nicole Stockdale nstockdale@dallasnews.com
11:20 am on September 30, 2014 | Permalink
http://dallasmorningviewsblog.dallasnews.com/2014/09/so-ebola-may-be-in-north-texas-dont-panic.html/?
The results of a preliminary test to determine whether a patient at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital of Dallas has the disease are due today. (Staff photo)
During a cross-country drive to Yellowstone some 15 years ago, my now-husband and I were entranced by an audiobook that made the time fly by: Richard Preston’s “The Hot Zone: A Terrifying True Story.” There started my fascination with viral hemorrhagic fevers like Ebola and Marburg.
But as epidemiologist Tara Smith wrote in August when some people started freaking out about two Ebola patients being flown back to the United States for treatment:
If all you know of Ebola is from The Hot Zone or Outbreak, well, that’s not really what Ebola looks like. I interviewed colleagues from Doctors without Borders a few years back on their experiences with an Ebola outbreak, and they noted:
As for the disease, it is not as bloody and dramatic as in the movies or books. The patients mostly look sick and weak. If there is blood, it is not a lot, usually in the vomit or diarrhea, occasionally from the gums or nose. The transmission is rather ordinary, just contact with infected body fluids. It does not occur because of mere proximity or via an airborne route (as in Outbreak if I recall correctly).
Smith’s article pointed out that Ebola is already in the U.S.; it’s being studied extensively by researchers here.
But that’s in a controlled research environment, you might so. So I’ll point out that there have been several recent cases of people in the U.S. who have contracted deadly hemorrhagic fevers: For example, a Lassa Fever case was reported most recently in April. A Marburg case was reported in 2008.
In fact, the woman who brought Marburg to the U.S. survived. She wrote an essay this summer on the parallels with the Ebola outbreak: “If the Ebola virus is exported to the United States, as the Marburg virus was by me, I don’t fear an outbreak here. Our health care system is prepared. I’m proof of that.”
As all the news headlines will tell you, Ebola is terrifying; we can’t make light of that. And the recent CDC forecast showing that, if unchecked, Ebola cases could top 1.4 million by January underscores why this outbreak is such a crisis.
But the risks here are not the same. As Smith, the epidemiologist, put it:
Ebola is a terrible disease. It kills many of the people that it infects. It can spread fairly rapidly when precautions are not carefully adhered to: when cultural practices such as ritual washing of bodies are continued despite warnings, or when needles are reused because of a lack of medical supplies, or when gloves and other protective gear are not available, or when patients are sharing beds because they are brought to hospitals lacking even such basics as enough beds or clean bedding for patients.
But that is not the case in Dallas County. The patient who may have Ebola (test results are due today) is in isolation. Health officials are already investigating everyone he or she has been in contact with. Hospitals are trained in how to respond to such diseases and have the necessary supplies.
“This is not Africa,” Dallas County Health and Human Services director Zachary Thompson told The Morning News. “We have a great public health infrastructure to deal with this type of disease.”
Sounds like this case is positive. The “Public Messaging” and “Narrative” is strong with this one.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.